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LA Johnson/NPR
How To Make A
Civics Education Stick
Emily Cardinali
August 14, 2018
How do you teach kids to be active participants in government? Or to
tell the difference between real news and fake news?
In their last legislative sessions, 27 states considered bills or other
proposals that aim to answer these questions. Many of those proposals
are rooted in popular ideas about the best ways to teach civics,
including when kids should start, what they should learn and how to
apply those lessons. Here's a look at some of those concepts.
Start when they're young, go into college
Little kids know about rules.
If you explain the reasons behind the rules, they'll understand that,
too. Charles Quigley, executive director of the Center for Civic
Education, says children grasp these concepts as early as kindergarten.
That's also a good time to introduce the idea of authority, and that
people in authority should follow their own rules.
He warns against waiting until high school.
"The knee-jerk reaction to teach civics in high school is too little,
too late," he says. "What's the dropout rate in some places? Forty
percent? Some never get to that high school class."
And according to Jim Shon of the Hawaii Educational Policy Center,
civics education needs to extend into college. When kids grow up
together in school, they build a community and are invested in it. He
says after graduation, that community often disappears.
"It is kind of hard to make students grasp the idea that, 'Oh, there's
still greater community beyond what you had in school.' That's the
baseline of a civic education. This is our community of our country."
This year, both Florida and Missouri approved a civics requirement for
public college students.
Be inclusive
No one is born with an inherent knowledge of how the U.S. government
works, and everyone has some interaction with government every day. But
some students learn more about their government than others.
On the civics portion of the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, commonly called the "Nation's Report Card," students of color
and low-income students have consistently scored lower than their
white, wealthier counterparts. "If there are students who are not
receiving adequate instruction in civics education, and if those
students are among the disadvantaged groups, then that's going to
perpetuate some of the barriers to political participation and
representation that we've seen in the past," says Elizabeth Levesque,
an education research fellow at the Brookings Institution.
That distance between marginalized communities and government has a
disenfranchising effect.
"What's happening is the affluent communities — political elites — are
getting a good civics education," Charles Quigley says. "This is
contributing to the empowerment gap."
Create a lab for civics learning
The principles of the U.S. government are enshrined in founding
documents, but civics classes don't have to be a narrow, boring reading
of those texts.
"You'd never have a biology class without having a lab," says Louise
Dubé, executive director of iCivics. "Kids must know, they must learn,
they must evaluate, they must have the skills — but they must also do."
Dubé's organization, founded by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra
Day O'Connor, creates free games and lessons for civics teachers. The
games teach students about their personal rights, how local government
works and how to anchor their opinions in facts. iCivics is also part
of a group supporting a Massachusetts bill that would incorporate
hands-on civics projects into the state's curriculum.
At one Florida middle school, students learned about laws by writing
bills — and in 2003, one of those bills made it to the Florida
legislature.
A class at Hialeah Middle School came up with the proposal, which would
prohibit having and selling drugs within 1,000 feet of public spaces
frequented by children. When it passed into law, then-Florida Gov. Jeb
Bush held the signing ceremony at their school outside Miami.
Michelle Montesino, now 29, was part of that class and still remembers
that day. "It definitely showed me that if you believe in something and
you feel something is important, to not be afraid to voice it," she
says.
But you don't need to draft legislation to learn about civics.
When social studies teacher Todd Heuston stands in front of his
students on the first day of class in Anchorage, Alaska, he knows some
of them just aren't interested.
"A lot of students are trying to find ways to take my U.S. government
class online," he says. "They don't see any value in it other than it's
simply just another hurdle or hoop to go through before graduation."
It's hard to get his students to connect with what's happening in
Washington, so Heuston focuses on local issues like curfew laws and
marijuana policy. Then, when national issues come up, his students know
how to ground their opinions in facts.
"They don't always apply calculus every single day. They don't always
apply history every day. But citizenship, civic engagement and
involving themselves in the government is something they do every
single day."
"Question everything"
"Civic participation in 2018 is different from civic participation in
1950," says Jon Valant, an education research fellow at the Brookings
Institution.
Today, Valant says, it's harder to instill empathy for people with
different opinions because technology makes it easier to ignore those
perspectives. You can unfriend someone on Facebook or mute specific
phrases on Twitter. But living in a bubble means you have less
opportunity or need to empathize with others.
Plus, students are inundated with information from social media, and
they need to learn how to wade through it all to find the facts.
Amy Raper encourages students to do just that. She's an eighth grade
social studies teacher in Pheonix, and says, "These kids think, 'Oh,
Kanye West says this so it must be true.' I'm like, 'Guys, you have to
look at everything. Facebook and social media cannot be your only way
of finding knowledge.' "
Instead of dismissing the information her students see online, Raper
asks them to verify it.
One piece of advice she hopes sticks? "Question everything."
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